Website of David Bryant Copeland

Top 5 Shocking Omissions from Spring MVC

January 09, 2010

Been working with Spring MVC recently. My enthusiasm has waned somewhat, as I've discovered that for all of it's tweakability and configurableosity, it omits what I believe to be incredibly obvious things:

Simple, 80/20 conventions by default - While the phrase "convention over configuration" appears numerous times
in the Spring documentation, it is still unable to call the foo method of the class
BarController when I request the url bar/foo without a lot of configuration, some of which subtly conflicts
and causes silent failures. The default configuration is useless

Debugging the Routing - I shovel angle bracket after annotation after angle bracket into Spring and it simply can not tell me what
URL patterns are mapped to where, and why a given URL isn't mapped, nor what to do to get it mapped. It's whole purpose is to map URLs to controllers.
Shocking.

Simple internal routing without magic strings - If I've mapped FooController's bar
method, shouldn't I be able to redirect/route to that in code via route(FooController.class,"bar"), regardless of the specific URL that
FooController and bar respond to? Instead, I've got magic strings everywhere and if my urls ever change, god help me. And don't get me
started about accessing this stuff via tests.

Simple web-testing - Adding a dependency on JWebUnit doesn't cut it. Jetty and Tomcat cannot hot deploy. How do people test these things??!?!

Test Fixture Support - I had to hack this up with DBUnit. With maven in the mix, it's a huge hit to productivity, but at least I have it. What project doesn't need this??!?!